Cyndi Lauper:
A Memoir
by Cyndi Lauper and Jancee Dunn
Altria Books
She sang about girls having fun, “bopping” (not what you think), and took the stage like a hurricane of colored hair and wild clothes.
To fans, it seemed that Cyndi Lauper — who broke through with her 1983 album, “She’s So Unusual” — was the ultimate free spirit, burdened by no more than the occasional broken heart.
But in her meandering self-titled memoir, the Queens native reveals layers of abuse, anguish and discontent in her childhood and early career that makes you wonder how she kept smiling, much less dancing.
Born Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper on June 22, 1953, Lauper’s parents divorced when she was only 5. She and her siblings — older sister Elen and younger brother Fred (nicknamed “Butch”) — lived a solitary existence with their waitress mother, who worked 14-hour days. Their quiet life changed, however, when their mother eventually remarried.
“We were all happy for her,” Lauper writes. “Unfortunately, she married a pedophile who beat her and bullied her. He’d threaten to beat her parents and rape her daughters while she was at work.”
At 17, she fled their Ozone Park home for good after she caught her stepfather spying on her while she took a bath. “I heard his creepy giggle and saw my stepfather’s pear-shaped shadow” against the frosted glass on the bathroom door, she says.
Then she saw his “crazy eye” looking through a tiny hole in the glass — which broke during a prior outburst when he threw her mother against the door.
“It was too much,” she says. “It was worse than him beating the dog when she cried . . . It was worse than him touching himself, right outside our bedroom window.”
Even after moving in with her sister, who by then had her own apartment, she was still not free from predators.
Short on cash for transportation and dressed in an old mini-dress and high heels one day, Lauper hitchhiked to a job interview. She was picked up by a man who wouldn’t let her out of his car until they had sex. “It was a bad experience, and then I felt I deserved it because I must have looked like a whore.”
She fell into depression, but the longtime Beatles fan found solace in music — notably the song “Across the Universe” by John Lennon.
“I sang it to myself all the time, because it had a prayer in it and it would help me to free my mind instead of agonizing over my life.”
In the mid-1980s, Lauper developed her four-octave voice and gained notice in a series of cover bands. She paid for sound equipment — and developed her dance moves — by working as a stripper named “Carrot” in Queens.
Her style came from Screaming Mimi’s, a Manhattan thrift shop where she once worked. “To me, the look wasn’t just a style — it was a movement . . . A Jackson Pollock thing, that modern, cutting-edge thing where you mix elements together that would never have been mixed together in that time.” She admits getting a review that said, “I can’t even hear her sing because of her clothes,” but Lauper didn’t care.
Even success had a dark side, though. While she was a singer with a group in which she evolved as the star attraction, she was sexually assaulted by one of the band’s founders. To make matters worse, his girlfriend held Lauper down during the attack. Lauper’s ascension in the band, she says, made her attacker feel “the power slip away from him, and it had come to me. So this act was like a very animal instinct to dominate.”
When she confronted the girlfriend about her actions, Lauper was horrified because “she told me it was because she loved the guy and wanted to make him happy.”
She remembers a 1989 chance encounter with that band member, when she was a worldwide celebrity and he was toiling “in a deli or something” and long separated from his accomplice girlfriend. “You know when you get the grander picture?” she writes.
“I thought, ‘You know what, pal? As you treat others, at one point in your life, whether it’s now or later, you’re going to get it back.’ Everything in my life has been a lesson like that. Every freakin’ thing.”
LAUPER doesn’t have a lot of fond memories of her early struggles. “A lot of places in New York City didn’t pay,” she writes, leveling specific criticism at legendary dive club CBGB, which closed in 2006. “The owner, Hilly Kristal, wasn’t like a sweet pussycat type of guy. He didn’t pay anybody either. Cheap bastard.”
Lauper vaulted to fame in 1984 with the single “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” a song originally written by a man but reworked by Lauper to give it a more anthemic “girl power” vibe. It set the tone for Lauper, an unapologetic feminist and liberal who fought oppressive, degrading behavior throughout her career.
Fellow musicians were some of the worst offenders. “I’d hear about guys sleeping with a mother and daughter, and things like that,” Lauper writes. “I was like, ‘What the f–k is that?’ ”
In 1985, when she met with director Steven Spielberg about doing the soundtrack for the movie “Goonies,” she was appalled by his predominantly male office.
“You can’t believe how they were talking about women; they’d start talking about casting an actress and make gross comments about her body. It made me wonder, ‘What am I doing here?’ ”
In her typically blunt style, she also told Spielberg that it was “not very creative” for her to perform the title song’s music video in front of a green screen and suggested they do something “a little more inspiring.” Spielberg, a wizard of green-screen effects, was so insulted he walked out of the meeting and assigned an underling to oversee the project. “I always say the wrong things to the right people,” she writes.
That included Bob Dylan, who said he liked her playing so much he would have her in his band — “and that’s saying something because I don’t like chicks in bands.”
“Was that an insult or a compliment?” she replied.
“Oh, what are you, one of those bra-burning women’s libbers?”
Lauper took a deep breath and said, “Well, you know, Bob, if I’m not concerned about my civil liberties, who will be?”
Dylan just meekly nodded.
She recalls a 1987 music-industry gathering of “power brokers with their trophy wives who barely spoke (and when they did it was about their husbands).” “I definitely felt the hierarchy of who was who,” she says.
At the event, she also had a run-in with Bruce Springsteen and his then-wife, actress Julianne Phillips. After complaining to him about the sexist atmosphere, Lauper says, he shot her a dirty look for demonizing their industry benefactors.
“I heard the way he wrote and sang about women and knew that he understood them — understood us,” she says. “Instead it was like he condoned that whole horrible, sexist scene.”
Of Phillips, Lauper says it was a “big f–kin’ mistake” for her to marry Springsteen because her career went nowhere after she and the iconic singer separated.
“I always say, ‘See a famous man, run the other way,’ ” she writes. “The only person who was never hurt by being with a famous man was Madonna.”
During the late 1980s, her disdain for powerful men in music grew.
They were “wildly out of control,” she says. “So many of them were on coke, and everyone was sexist.”
When a longtime relationship ended with her boyfriend and then-manager, Dave Wolff, she knew exactly who to blame.
He was caught between an independent woman who did things her way and “the biggest, most sexist, most macho guys in the world,” she writes. “They’d say, ‘You’re the man — you tell her what to do.’ ”
“Those interfering record company guys really broke us up,” she says. “They were just pigs, thick-headed with gold chains and hair coming out of their f–kin’ shirts, white shoes and those f–kin’ golf pants.”
But Lauper holds particular disdain for music executive Tommy Mottola, former head of Sony, with whom she sparred at her one-time label.
“In his office there were all these hunting trophies. There was even a scorpion frozen in plastic,” she recalls. “He collects things, and I didn’t want to be part of his collection.”
In fact, she blames poor sales of her 1993 album, “Hat Full of Stars,” on lack of marketing because he was too distracted by his newest trophy.
“The record company didn’t bother promoting it,” Lauper says. “They just threw it away, while Tommy Mottola was up on top, putting every dollar into his new bride Mariah Carey’s career.”
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Lauper issued a string of albums, but none ever matched the success of “She’s So Unusual” and its follow-up, 1986’s “True Colors.” She says she found it increasingly difficult to work in an industry that was guided more by commercial viability than creativity.
Now she also feels relegated to a status other than A-list by the industry. Her last Sony record, the 2008 dance album “Bring Ya to the Brink,” went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance/Club Play Songs list but didn’t get radio play because, she says, she’s over 30 (she’s 59). “People in the music business have a bias against older people because they operate on the myth that music is a disposable art. It is not.”
She has instead focused on gay rights — her sister is a lesbian, and in 2011, Lauper founded the True Colors Residence for homeless LGBT youth.
Other projects, including a pending reality show and co-writing next year’s Broadway musical “Kinky Books” with Harvey Fierstein, have grabbed her attention.
Perhaps now the girl can finally have fun.